Quick Conversions with Launch Center Pro and Soulver
There are some great tools out there to convert things like currency, distances and measurements. Even Siri can do this fairly well, but the one thing I always find frustrating is that the process of doing this can be fairly slow and in a lot of cases requires a data connection. Growing up in the United States, I was unfortunately never exposed to the metric system or Celsius. Since I've moved to Dublin, I'm find myself doing a lot of conversions from one unit to another.
I was poking around in Launch Center Pro for iOS the other day to just see what kinds of things I could do, and I noticed one of the options was Soulver. My main use case for Soulver has always been one-off conversions or keeping score while playing Farkle with my girlfriend. It occurred to me that this would make a really nice way to do quick conversions.
I didn't want to have to create a mess of different actions for each unit. The way around this was to create a variable within Soulver and always reference back to it with multiple conversions. I started out simple with a quick US Dollar to Euro and Pounds and vice-versa.
To achieve this, Launch Center Pro uses x-callback-urls which allows apps to send data to another app and perform actions. The following url requests a number and then sends over this number as a variable to Soulver
soulver://new?text=x%20%3D%20[prompt-num:Text]%0Ax%20euro%20to%20usd%0Ax%20gbp%20to%20usd%0A----------------%0Ax%20usd%20to%20euro%0Ax%20usd%20to%20gbp%0A----------------&title=Currency%20Conversion
This worked perfectly and solved the two biggest requirements that I had: to be quick and to not rely on a data connection. I then wanted to go a little further and so I did some very basic unit conversions.
The url for the action is very similar, but using different conversions
soulver://new?text=x%20%3D%20[prompt-num:Text]%0AFahrenheit%3A%20x%20C%20to%20F%0ACelsius%3A%20x%20F%20to%20C%0A-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20%0AMiles%3A%20x%20km%20to%20mi%0AKilometers%3A%20x%20mi%20to%20km%0A-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20-%20%0AFeet%3A%20x%20m%20to%20feet%0AMeters%3A%20x%20feet%20to%20m%0A----------------&title=Temperature
If you have both Launch Center Pro and Soulver, you can download both of these actions here: